Vancouver's Eventbase global leader with its event apps, on a hiring spree

While Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s famous “walk in the snow” marked the end of a political career, in Vancouver it was a little known walk in the University Endowment Lands that launched a new beginning for two tech entrepreneurs, whose start-up created the first Olympic Games mobile app.

For Ben West and Jeff Sinclair, the launch of their company, then named Xomo, now Eventbase, which came out of a conversation while on a walk with their dogs and kids, was at a time when the economic downturn was hurting business. And the product they were proposing wasn’t one many companies or organizations even thought they needed.

“We had to push them to understand this is going to be big by the time the Olympics come around,” said West of their pitch to 2010 Olympic organizers. “There were no precedents or playbook but we thought it’s going to be big and we were willing to take a risk and foot the bill initially to get it built ourselves and help them in procuring a sponsor to actually turn it into a viable product.”

Bell, the official telecommunications sponsor for the 2010 Olympics signed on as a sponsor, with West and Sinclair expecting there would be about 50,000 downloads of the app. It did far better than that.

“With their expectations of 50,000 to 80,000 downloads and then blowing through that to over a million in the first few days, they were happy, the Olympics were happy and we were happy,” said West.

The 2010 Olympics proved a global launching pad for the company. It is still a global leader, with its event app platform used for Olympic Games since then, plus major conferences, events and festivals from the Sundance Film Festival and Lollapalooza to South by Southwest. Most recently it has expanded into iBeacon and mobile payments technology.

The co-founders first met in the early 2000s working at Stockhouse.com, where West was chief information officer and Sinclair director of products. They remained friends and were working at different companies, West at his own and Sinclair as CEO of The Level, a company that provided the global content management system for Google’s websites, when they met in 2009 with their kids and dogs for the stroll in the endowment lands.

“The economy was in the doldrums,” said Sinclair, whose other work included the 2010 Olympics website. “We knew we wanted to do a mobile company and we thought, the Olympics are in nine months.

“I knew all the people from the Olympics from my last gig and we managed to convince the Olympics to give us a shot at doing the app and that really put us on top of doing event applications.”

It won best mobile app in Canada at the Canadian Media Awards and with a globally recognized anchor customer, the company’s future was almost assured.

“It set the level we would operate at, it allowed us to export our product internationally,” said West. “We could walk into any event, any business and be taken seriously.”

For the bootstrapped company, sustained by the founders’ own money — including a second mortgage on West’s home — it also meant early revenue at a time when a lot of start-ups were winning customers but finding it hard to make money.

“For us, we’ve been profitable since we started because we had to be,” said Sinclair, who said the company is doubling revenues every year, although he declined to disclose revenues.

A US$2 million investment by SXSW has given the Yaletown company it latest boost, not just for the dollars but for the access to one of the biggest technology shows in the United States, which has become a test bed for the company’s newest technology.

At the recent SXSW, Eventbase installed more than 1,000 iBeacons at the events, making it the largest deployment of iBeacon technology at an event and providing attendees, through its Around Me feature, a way to identify and connect with people around them. iBeacons are low-powered transmitters that link to smartphones in the immediate area, so for attendees who choose to share their whereabouts, they can find friends and make new connections.

Eventbase’s success leaves the company facing an issue common to many Vancouver tech companies — finding the talent to fuel expansion. The 55-person company is hosting a job fair today and will be among companies taking part in the upcoming Tech Fest, a recruiting event by TechVibes taking place May 14 at the Commodore Ballroom.

Among the perks for prospective employees are an on-site barista who can have your morning coffee order ready when you arrive to work, a heritage office that was once the site of the Woodward’s stable with iron rings still hanging from old-growth beams where horses were once tied up, and the opportunity for an all-expenses-paid trip your choice to one the festivals and events the company is involved in each year.

But the biggest perk, according to the co-founders, is the chance to be at the leading edge delivering “a great product for the biggest brands in the world.”